Today I saw with sadness that our activity is gradually decreasing, not a single post about the problem here today. I think that’s what the Blizzards are waiting for. Or maybe they don’t give a damn. Whether we write here or are already tired and desperate.
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I don’t think they care. Okay … there might be one or two who care, but they’re in no position to do anything about it.
I can see a future where there are actually no real people answering tickets either.
Looking at all the responses for this and other issues recently, all they can do is link to pages and offer inaccurate “advice”. So if they’ve already gotten rid of the staff who cared and who were actually able to help, and downgraded what those answering the tickets are able to do, the next step is to get rid of them almost completely. Perhaps keep a few on just to deal with account issues (payments and the like).
The number of bugs since TWW have continued to increase, not decrease. Which isn’t a good sign. By this point in time they should have a handle on any backlog and bugs relating to the start of the new expansion, and be working on fairly current issues. But some of the big bugs have been persisting for months now with no resolution in sight.
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Well, yes. I glance through not only the threads about our empty banks. Many, many threads about a bunch of bugs in the game. It’s even unusual to see so many gross errors that are not fixed, although I’ve been playing since 2010.
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On the equivalent US thread, there is someone who just posted, saying that they put a load of pets into their (previously wiped) guild bank, and after the server maintenance yesterday, the pets all turned to generic pet cages, and mouseover doesn’t show what the pets should be either.
Another thread (EU? US?) was started by someone who had some items go missing from their guild bank during the recent Wednesday reset too.
I am suspicious of the amount of ‘in-game wealth’ that thus loss caused, and the truly bizarre lack of compensation (as an example, it is probably safe to assume that any guild bank with 2 or more tabs had ‘stuff’ in it. But no compensation.
Not even restoration of the items shown as deposited in the logs of the wiped banks. That shows they couldn’t be bothered. This was a possible small partial improved restoration, but they didn’t bother.
I could singlehandedly restore all affected guild banks without doubling up to any significant extent, if they were to give me, under NDA,
- sitting in a room with an isolated computer with all the data,
- two SD cards for Raspberry Pi (one with Linux formRPi5, one with RISC OS for RPi4). (they take the SD cards away afterwards)
- an internet connected computer to look up stuff (isolated from the WoW data)
- the backups from just before the wipe (I shall assume they kept these archived once they knew of the issue, which they did about 4 days later)
- the backups from just after the wipe (again, I shall assume they kept these archived once they knew of the issue, about 4 days later).
I could have it done in a week (most of the time would be learning whatever new languages needed; I know asm so …)
While the devs don’t look at this thread, if they do, then:
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This isn’t just about guild banks. Rather, disappearing reputation, honour levels, transmogs, achievements, mounts, map exploration, personal bank contents, warband bank contents and tabs, guild bank contents. (The common theme - stuff disappearing). I hope the player database is better backed up?
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The above shows there is code throughout the game that says ‘if some data is corrupt, delete it / set it to zero’. This makes sense in an MMO. How else do you handle it without the server crashing every few seconds?. And how else do you handle it in 2003 when Pentium 4s were amazing (and amazingly hot) CPUs?
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It is now 2024. RAM, hard drives, CPUs, everything is so much cheaper.
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Start looking through the code. When you find code that says something like
if (item.cyclicredundancypassed == false)
{item.status = TO_DELETE;}
Take that class of item (be it an item, an honour value, a reputation value), and add a new field to the data structure;
bool failedcyclicredundancycheck;
And change the code to
if (item.cyclicredundancypassed == false)
{item.status = STATUS_FROZEN;
item.failedcyclicredundancycheck = true;
}
This would take a single binary bit. Setting it to ‘true’ would allow you to ‘freeze’ faulty data, without deleting it.
If this was in place, then:
- guild bank slots could have had items marked ‘red’, immoveable.
- Reputation, honour, could go ‘red’ and no longer increase.
- map exploration could just be left to work anyway!
And so on.
Then, Bug Reports would have ‘guild bank items red, can’t move them’ or ‘my reputation is in red writing, and won’t increase’
The developers could then say ‘that’s easy; we’ll look at the red flagged items, figure out why they are flagged, fix the code, and then remove the red flagged bit from items / reputation / achievements etc’.
The brutosaur will patch over the unsubs from all of this in the short term (quarterly). However;
- imagine how much money could have been made from brutosaur sales to ppl who got their guild banks restored?. I would suspect that if such a catastrophic data loss was fixed, many would have got one to thank Blizzard. I would have. Instead I have a range of characters from level 70-level 80, stopped playing Retail, doing Classic only, for a while. Not forever.
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Looking at the US thread, there are an ever increasing number of ‘first posts’ of people who came back to WoW to find empty guild banks. The number affected is likely much, much bigger.
Also in bug reports is someone who had a store-bought mount vanish!
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I’m not sure Blizzard would survive the uproar if that happened en-masse with that £90 mount …
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I am sure that they will survive, the reputational risks are minimal when the problem is hushed up and ignored by those who should be responsible for this problem to the players.
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I was so busy working that I almost forgot that another week had passed. Quite expectedly, I still haven’t received a single letter with compensation for my two wiped guild banks. The developers were probably too busy drawing the new Brutosaur and completely forgot to press the corresponding button. I continue to wait.
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i just waited for the returning ppl to report this too… (and i am sorry for them 
)
… unfortunately, very few will actually notice something is missing, and even fewer will say anything about it.
And for those who do, the response will inevitably be:
‘Oh, that was ages ago; there’s nothing we can do about it now.’ 
Well… at least now we know for sure it did not only affect data from active players at this time … -.- fantastic… we got some information … sigh
A lot of things seem to go missing—not just guild bank items.
Searching for ‘missing’ or ‘lost’ in the forums, it looks like almost everything is affected. 
Maybe not as badly as the guild banks, though
Well… maybe the personal bank (with bags) and regular bags… not yet.
→ Stuff in bags… I want to KEEP the bags, PLEASE! 
Please, don’t change them!! 
At least not until you’ve hired that new senior database engineer (yep, I saw the job posting) and they’ve had time to work some magic ! 
"
Btw … I’m almost too scared to log in and check my guild banks again. 
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Just been looking at the US thread. Starting to get reports of recent (as in, last day or two) guild bank wipes (aside from the ‘empty pet cages’ bug that has also arisen)… 
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Seriously, WTF are they doing at Blizzard?
Already lost 5 bank tabs full of items, nothing restored.
In the 2 tabs that still have items I now have 42 mystery cages instead of pets…
Crazy idea, how about instead of pushing out as much FOMO content as fast as possible, fix some bugs first. Or even better put a hold on all new content and focus on a 11.0.6 patch first that fixes all bugs.
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Hmm…things don’t need to get better. I wonder how soon forum moderators will start slamming the doors on such topics?
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The situation is actually challenging. You can’t ‘ban’ discussion of certain bugs (unless you put in the TOS ‘you cannot speak of the uncompensated August 2024 Guild Bank Wipes’). That would just make people curious. This is a long-term issue, especially as people come back for the anniversary to an empty guild bank.
Worse, you can’t even ‘close threads, autodelete in 6 days, moving the post to this current thread’ for what may be a new wave of guild bank issues (pet cages, some vanishing). Any new guild bank issues are new bugs, given they fixed the guild banks, so …
The core issue is about data, and databases.
Server restarts once a week help clear accumulated ‘useless’ data.
But stuff like guild bank contents, achievments, rep, honour?
Any code that has the power to wipe this kind of data needs to be removed. There is no need for it. Rather, it would be very easy to ‘freeze’ any data that the server doesn’t like. Freeze it, not delete it.
The guild bank wipes would have just been ‘Most of my stuff has turned red and I can’t move it’ or ‘my honour is stuck at 497, and written in red’. Those bug reports would have led to a simple review and repair. Because repairs are easy if you don’t delete data in the first place.
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Slight fix for that pet issue… and I hate doing their job as the screwed me over with deleting 7 tabs and treating me like dirt…
Put those pet cages in your bag they should turn normal again. Its a graphical glitch.
Unless people start to leave in droves I think this time marks another phase of: squeeze as much money out of the player base and size down the entire operation. Which in turn will just increase the bugs and quality of the game.
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Still missing all items (draenor stuff) from one guild bank - however I checked today on my battle pet guildbank and behold … all MISSING SLOTS WERE RESTORED with unidentified pet cages
After I moved them to my bags, they got fully identified
So at least for the pet cages that went poof - they were restored.
Getting my hopes up for future restores as well …
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I’m still kicking around logging in weekly to check bank / mail until my sub expires. I got excited at this “news” as whilst I could live with the materials I lost, the three tabs of L25 rare pets was a killer to me.
However, I still have empty bank tabs where my pets were, and like everyone else I have the graphical glitch showing all banked pets as caged items.
So, will continue the weekly or so check in, but not holding out for any change to the situation, only potential further deterioration of the care that this company gives to it’s players.
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I run the guild Blood fury on Chamber of aspects . I understand the GM’s can only give a polite reply but they really need to pull their finger out on this . It has been going on too long and although kiss a**e replies of " you are a valued player" are nice they get a bit boring after a bit. As with any guild bank that has been there for a while it isn’t just mats but pets mounts and more . The guild joke atm is that they raided the banks for the anniversary event as it looked like they deleted pets to sell them back. I hope this gets sorted out soon as the guilds are not happy and unhappy players will walk away from the game.
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So people are aware all of my bank tabs were full and are now empty. Nothing has appeared at all . I was told once that things were made invisible which I find odd as you can still put other things in the guild bank . As anyone will know you can’t put anything in a slot if there is something already there. Unless I have created a bottomless bank and I haven’t searched through it all lol.
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That is awesome (I assume these are items that were lost in the ‘first wave’ of guild wipes)?
It may also be a little concerning (they said the ‘restoration’ was over weeks ago, and it was by post, so reappearing items after all this time could suggest ongoing instability of the database). It could also mean they are actually trying to fix it, and something really catastrophic happened (ransomware or something like that?) Although lack of restoration from partial guild logs makes it less likely.
Will have to keep guessing, but am glad you got some stuff back 
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I believe it was any bank that was accessed leading up to the patch and during the mini event. The guild bank was completely wiped out. I am not talking about a few items, completely empty. A guild running since the start of the game, accumulates a lot of items, some that can’t be replaced so for anyone here saying its just an item, no its not just an item. Its time that players spent. As people should know the internet doesn’t forget, there is a log of what went missing and where - but the truth is that Blizzard just doesnt have the hours spare to resolve it, you can’t just loose data it just royally sucks that the response were given is “shrug” whose to say it wont happen again, or to your personal bank too.
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